Kagoshima Incident

The Kagoshima Incident occurred in 1863 when samurai Okazaki Atsutake, Shimazu Mitsukasu, and Minamoto Tokikuni, obeying Emperor Komei's Order to Expel the Barbarians, murdered Americans Porter Samuels and Riley Wheeldon in the port of Kagoshima. The murders led to the Bombardment of Kagoshima and Western intervention in Japan.

Background
For 200 years, Japan was at peace under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled from Edo with the Tokugawa family at its head. The Emperor had nominal control over Japan, but real power lay with the shoguns. Japan prospered under the shoguns as Tokugawa allies ruled their own fiefs (known as han or domains) but, in 1853, American warships changed everything. Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan with a US Navy armada and signed the Treaty of Peace and Amity with Shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi, opening Japan to trade. Japan made agreements with Western countries that would go on to favor the West more than Japan, and the people suffered as the economy failed. Soon, the United Kingdom and France began to play roles in the modernization of Japan as their merchants arrived in the country. Angry at the Western powers' involvement in Japan and their negative impact on the Japanese people, Emperor Komei decided to overrule the Shogun with the Order to Expel the Barbarians, where he asked for the Japanese people to throw ten years of peace into the sea and expel the Westerners.

Event


One night, the Emperor dispatched Okazaki Atsutake, Minamoto Tokikuni, and Shimazu Mitsukasu to murder American soldier Porter Samuels and merchant Riley Wheeldon as they sat reviewing documents in a waterfront house at the city of Kagoshima in Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyushu in the Satsuma Domain. The three Sonno Joi samurai headed to the house with their katana swords, and they knocked on the door, alerting the two Americans. Samuels and Wheeldon were confused, and Wheeldon got up from his chair to answer the door, where he was hacked down by a katana. The samurai proceeded to enter the house and murdered Samuels with their swords before fleeing the scene. The Emperor's will had been done, leading to an end to ten years of peace and the beginning of an era of contention between the traditionalist imperialists and the pro-West shogunate.

Aftermath
The incident led to a harsh Western response in the Bombardment of Kagoshima later that year, and the result of the incident was the divide between imperialists (who eventually allied with the United Kingdom and United States) and the shogunate (which allied with France). The Boshin War of 1867-1869 broke out between the two sides as a result of the divide, and the result would be Japan becoming an empire ruled by the Emperor himself, and the country would ironically Westernize and modernize as the shogunate had hoped to do.